ALFRED KAZIN
33
tage over American literature, so it appeared to the American critic who
helped to make Forster famous in America, Lionel Trilling, is that the
class war, class distinctions of every kind, social rivalries of the most
minute (and even nastiest) kind, are great for literature. As conflict seems
to be the first rule in life, so conflict taken seriously enough, without
sentimental hopes of easy deliverance, is comedy, is tragedy, is dialogue, is
history, is FORCE. Only an Englishman would have opened Chapter Six
of
Howards Elld
with:
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthink–
able, and only
to
be approached by the statistician or the poet. This
story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend
that they are gentlefolk.
The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility.
He was not in the abyss, but he could sec it.
This would have enraged the California novelist and pioneer socialist,
Jack London, who in 1902 went down into the "horror" of London's
poor to write
The People of the Abyss,
a powerful document not likely to
interest anyone in England but the Salvation Army. Because
Howards End
is rooted not even in Fabian socialism but in the dream of "personal re–
lationships," one of the felt tensions in the book is the fear of war be–
tween England and Germany. The Schlegels' father (now dead) was a
German idealist who fought for Prussia before it took Germany over,
and in disgust left for England and married an Englishwoman. Even the
famous German literary name of "Schlegel," connected with August
Wilhelm von Schlegel's translation of Shakespeare, is representative.
Margaret and Helen Schlegel are relative outsiders in English society not
only because they are "not really English," but because they have been
dangerously infected by some old idealism from the Germany of poets
and philosophers.
*
So much for the background of
Howards End
and what we may fairly
take to be Forster's ruling concerns. One must be careful not to make
the book more solemn in tone than it actually is. It begins with one of
the most informal and delightful openings in modern fiction, a thor–
oughly unexpected way of proceeding that shows just how far 1910 has
departed from Victorian heaviness. (The Queen had died just nine years
before.) "One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister." This
is so Forsterian - easy in its approach, altogether unpretentious, of course
wily - that it is not until one goes back over the book, with the house,
Howards End, staying in mind as the embodiment of Forster's image of a
